Hello and welcome to Bladenmore's podcast series, Centre Stage.

My name is Shrina Patel and I'm an associate director at Bladenmore.

On Centre Stage, we tackle the issues that business communicators face, from sustainability

communications to employee engagement and brand.

In this episode, we're talking about investor relations with Laura Hater,

chief executive of the Investor Relations Society. Welcome to centre stage, Laura. It's great to have

you here. Thank you very much for having me. Get straight into it. I know we've got three themes

that we kind of wanted to speak about. But if I can ask you first, in the past,

you know, investor relations might have been seen as a cozy chat now and again between the

CEO and investor analysts. But today, conversations between companies and their stakeholders

take place against, you know, a backdrop of increasing regulation, media scrutiny and pressure.

So how has that affected the role of IR teams?

I think what we've seen is a real professionalisation of the role.

Recent pandemic, the environment, all the challenges that we're facing has just really

increased the profile of the role.

IROs have to, or investor relations officers really have to have good financial acumen.

So they've really had to adapt.

You know, long ago they were just traditional, perhaps seen as coordinators,

but now they're very much more the senior member with reporting into the executive team. So there's a lot of

changes that have happened in communications around, as we know recently, more interest in

sustainability issues. So the role has really broadened and that means that the investor relations

remit has broadened beyond just finance but also non-financial issues as well.

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